A thread every content creator must see.

Which argues against your point. Here's one content creator who has shifted his efforts from creating content to trying to protect his IP rights. I predict we'll see more content creators who were on the leading edge simply give up.

No, it won't kill SL. But, it's a serious threat.

Remember the Ardennes Forest? Ah, no worries, the Germans didn't make it through last time, so no worries there. Oops, wrong! Gee, just because bad things didn't happen last time doesn't mean they won't this time.

But, you might be right: this might only be a nightmare for a minority of content makers. No problem, if you're not one of them, eh?

I hope you're right and that the impact of this is small. I hope that in a year or two you can do the happy dance and say "I told you so!" But I'm sure that folks like RH won't be dancing with you, and I think it's worthwhile to consider what options would minimize the risk.

Correct, but it would require hacking the object code, which raises the bar considerably from merely modifying source. Furthermore, if LL distributes mandatory updates periodically, every bad guy will have to get a newly hacked version. This would go a long way to eliminate the casual thief.

Still, it's moot, since LL won't do it. They've already taken a different direction, and I think it would be too major a sea change to go back. (I'm assuming that copybotting is not a "SL killer". If it were, they'd suffer the sea change.)

Except that it won't. As has been shown time and time again by DRM epic failures, the amount of time it takes to crack and distribute updates to DRM is an order of magnitude LESS than the amount of time and effort it takes to make/patch it. So, while LL spends millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create this supposed "solution", a handful of people spend a weekend to break it, and disseminate it via their automatic updaters in the viewers.

Eliminate? Unlikely. Inconvenience for a day or two? Maybe. Then it will be weeks/months before the next "update", which will be broken and out within a day or two again.

Ever heard of Decal? It is a bot plug-in framework developed for the Asheron's Call MMORPG. AC would patch every month, and within a few hours, an update would go out, and would be back to business as usual. Now, at the time, AC didn't care about people running bots, within certain parameters, but neither did they have an open-source client.

Oh so it matters on the quality or the age of the item on whether it's ok to steal copies does it?
Please enlighten us with the scale on which items are judged ok to pirate copies of?
You couls start at other peoples stuff being ok to steal and your stuff not being ok at a guess

People can already kill each other with kitchen utensils, that doesn't mean we should allow everyone to walk around with military heavy assualt weaponary and grenade launchers.

Man, I so want to see some pirates killed with an eggbeater. <.<

well, I do scripting... so it's not stealable (unless you beleive the rumours) ... as for pirating copies of it, it's been done, businesses out there are using my work that I sell for 50-60k and making a lot of money from it without ever paying me a cent.... do I care? nope... some even had the audacity to IM me looking for support to fix bugs in stolen code.

I made my money from it, the time I invested in it was worth it, if other's have it now oh well.

You could file an edge on the beater blades of them suckers. nasteh way to go.

Espcially if you had one in each hand and they were cordless and you spent 27 years on a Tibetian mountain studying under an egg beater Jedi